In the 1920s, the Republican party still enjoyed an iron lock on the black voters of Philadelphia. This 1926 editorial cartoon published in the Philadelphia Tribune, the city’s oldest African American newspaper, reflects black reformers fury at the party’s manipulation of the black vote. Set during the “Season of False Faces and False Promises,” the cartoonist presented the Republican political boss as clown holding black puppets in one hand, while he reaches with his other hand into a barrel of jobs.
